Serial Experiments Lain E10: “Love”

It's time to come back to Serial Experiments Lain for the final stretch. We left off in an extremely silly place, with Lain confronting a cyber-uploaded JoJo villain looking fucker who may or may not be using a combination of alien technology and Spirit Science pseudophilosophy for world domination. Since then, people have told me that what's actually going on in this show is both significantly less dumb and significantly more ambiguous than what episode 9 suggested, though in that case I'm not sure what the point of that episode even was. Well, anyway, "Layer Ten: Love."


I feel like the intro is slower this time. Maybe it's just been too long, or maybe it means something. There's also no ominous quote or conversation excerpt this time, just the cyberdemon whispering the episode title. The episode opens where the previous one left off, with Lain confronting Dr. Masami on the street in front of her house. Or in a virtual simulation of the street in front of her house. Or it's a meeting between technopathic projections of one or both of them meeting in realspace on that street. It kind of stopped mattering a while ago now. Lain expresses skepticism of Masami's self-proclaimed divinity. Masami tries to convince her that she's dead and in the afterlife.

He may or may not be telling the truth, of course. Though if he is, it's probably the kind of afterlife that you can come back from if provided with a suitable nipple missile robo...oh wait nevermind, that isn't really him saying that. He and Lain are reading each other's minds and speaking for the other aloud. Or maybe he and Lain have just assumed each other's virtual appearances or switched bodies or something. It's Lain thinking that he's just a dead human rather than a God, and him reading her thoughts aloud. She then starts doing the same thing back.

As for why they might be doing this, I can only conclude that they're willing to put aside their differences for the shared goal of confusing the audience.

Anyway, as best I can follow this conversation, Masami snuck a complete virtual copy of his own brain into the Wired's new server hardware. At the time of this new Wired infrastructure coming online, echoes of his thoughts and ideas started bouncing around in the Schumann signals. The girl who killed herself at the beginning, Chisa, is - well, I'm not sure about this part, but as best as I can glean from their conversation - one of quite a few people who picked up a vague version of Masami's "abandon the flesh and become a higher being" desire and acted on it the only way they knew how. And I guess he assimilated them when they did that, somehow? Or else he just got enough of their own brainwaves through the Schumann-harnessing system to impersonate them? Or actual "data ghosts" are being randomly created by people who die or go through high-brain activity trauma as an unintended side effect of this whole thing, and Masami has some degree of influence over them? One or more of those things, I think.

The exchange ends with them switching back to talking for themselves, and Masami inviting Lain to shed her form and join him like Chisa did. IE, kill herself and let him get a good scan of her brain during its death throws or whatever. He then vanishes, and Amlain seems to switch out for Aglain just a second too late to call him out on his bullshit. Well, I guess he can probably hear her anyway even if he's no longer appearing to her, so maybe not too late after all.

The music for this part was some of the best of the entire show, I'll give the scene that much. Eerie, creeping, and otherworldly, while still retaining a science fictiony sound to it. The shot that follows it, of the telephone wires casting their shadow over Lain and her neighborhood from a bird's eye angle, is also a really well placed one, and it adds significance to all the other telephone wire shots we've seen until now. Those were all villain appearances. Masami is the wires criss-crossing overhead, leering down at his tiny, vulnerable victims below. The giant monster whose stomach Lain and all the other characters are already in.

This would be a lot more chilling if the buildup had been less silly, but still, it manages to be effective on at least a basic cinematographic level.

Cut to school the next day. Lain is silent as she enters her homeroom, but her eyes are sharp and her expression determined enough that I think this is Aglain rather than Amlain. Everyone is gossiping really loudly and energetically, including Arisu and the other girls. Either she's trying an experiment or she's shifted back to Amlain a moment later though, because when everyone else bows to the teacher and sits at their desks Lain remains standing right at the front of the class. No one notices. The teacher starts collecting people's homework, within a couple feet of Lain, without saying anything to or about her.

Lain protests to herself that she's real, she's alive, why is everyone acting as if she weren't?

What I suspect is that while Lain is (for the time being, at least) real and alive, she isn't physically present in the classroom. If she can use the Schumann resonances to project her Wired-avatar to multiple places at once, and she's been doing so more and more freely, she might have just forgotten where she left her physical body. Maybe it's still at home. Maybe it's wandering the city doing some random weird thing at the behest of one of her other personas.

Actually, a lot of the temporal confusion that some episodes have had can be explained by this. We can never tell whether we're looking at her actual body or one of her projections, and they act simultaneously. If the avatars are only sometimes visible to people "near" them, this would explain why she is sometimes ignored, sometimes interacted with normally, and sometimes seems to hypnotize everyone around her (the latter would be some sort of hyperstimulation effect she sometimes does to the brains she's appearing in without knowing it). As for which state happens in which situation...it could be related to which persona it is, random subconscious things or natural fluctuations in the Schumann matrix, or deliberate fuckery by Masami.

Well, I have a working theory now. Let's see if it lasts longer than any of the others. I'm guessing not, but it's all I've got right now so I'll hold onto it while I can anyway.

Although...now that Lain is wondering aloud about how natural bodilessness might or might not be for her, I wonder if maybe she actually never had one to begin with.

We know that her family isn't really her family. We know that she's only been living in that house for a few months, if not less. Have we ever seen her interact with physical, nonliving, non-motorized objects in a way that other people could verify? If not, maybe this entire setup has just been a realspace charade for the control/testing/whatever of an AI with a hallucinatory body. Sort of a weird scifi version of The Sixth Sense, in terms of how this is being handled.

Hmm. She did move that manila envelope around, which I'm pretty sure actually did have a physical microchip in it. So yeah, at least one of her bodies is physical. Either that, or she's full-on telekinetic, which doesn't seem like it fits.

Suddenly, Arisu looks up at Lain and says in a very harsh voice "you see, Lain? You aren't needed in the real world." This has got to be either Masami fuckery, or Lain making telepathic contact with a part of Arisu's brain that is both aware of her presence and still hates her for the...thing...with telling other people about her dirty daydreams. The former is a simpler explanation, so I'll go with that one for now.

Some really effectively sad and forlorn music starts as Lain silently leaves her school before class can even start and heads home. She finds the house empty. Her parents are gone, their room completely emptied. Almost everything is gone from downstairs as well, though there's still food (and milk!) in the refrigerator.

Lain's sister's room still has her things in it and appears lived in, though. Trashed, but lived in.

There's also a brief cut to said sister crouched on a floor making modem noises, but it's not clear at all where she is or if Lain is even seeing her. She isn't seen in any shots of the room itself, so I don't know.

As Lain is poking around the ruins of her sister's room, her "father" comes in behind her. She asks him, sadly, desperately, wtf, and he tells her that this is goodbye. He's sure she's "figured it out" by now.

Also, he addresses her as "Miss Lain," and says that while he didn't really enjoy playing house, he really did come to love her in a way. Even if he also envies her, for being what she is. As he starts to leave, Lain begs him not to leave her alone, but he simply says that she's not alone, and never has been or will be. She's being set free, or rather, she was always free but is now able to understand and act on this fact. The Wired will welcome her.

Well, small comfort to the part of Lain that really thinks and feels like a middle school girl. Lain's other aspects are probably fine with this, and were already living it in practice. But those aren't the parts of her that he seems to be talking to right now.

Fuck, this is dark.

The front door closes with a sickening finality behind him, leaving (am?)lain looking crushed and grief-stricken, alone.

Cut to Aglain standing in an environment that looks like a cross between downtown Tokyo and a microprocessor chip. Some ghostly cybervoices ask her if she has any questions or orders for them. She asks her internet ghost minions if the Knights are responsible for creating the "fake" version of her. Presumably referring to Trollain, I guess, but I don't know at this point. One cyberghost says that it doesn't know. Another randomly volunteers an internet rumor that the Knights of the Eastern Calculus are a pre-Wired secret society that's been using the human collective unconscious for magic bullshit for centuries. Sure, just throw an ancient conspiracy onto the pile with the aliens and spirit science and Final Fantasy villains, why not. From the sound of things, Masami subverted the Knights when he uploaded himself into the Schumann Wired and started posing as their Jordan Peterson Jungian archetype god or whatever. She resolves that its time for her to make a move against Masami via his minions.

Aglain seems to not be thinking at all about what Amlain is doing in the house. She's totally focused on dealing with Masami, and doesn't seem to have acted at all on the family revelations and ghostly school shenanigans. I wonder how connected the two of them actually are.

Cut to Cyberia, where the elf kids are alone on a dark and abandoned dance floor with no music or lighting. One of them complains about how boring this place has gotten. Lol, it's closed dummy. The creeper who is a kinda-sorta Knight looks up some online news on his tablet, and sees something unexpected.

Someone fed a list of names, faces, and evidence to the press. Or just hacked into the news sites and posted it themselves using their platforms.

Cue a montage of Knights being assassinated by men with eyepieces as they desperately try to go to ground, with others committing suicide rather than wait for the inevitable.

Well, that's certainly a thing. I'm not sure how far this will actually set Asami back, but he seems dependent on cooperative human agents to do at least some things, so he'll be handicapped until he can recruit more. I doubt that'll take him long though. Tech savvy people just looking for a cult to join are, sadly, never in short supply. Though the writers of this show might not have predicted the abundance of such, to be fair.

Cut to Lain in her room, in full Borg Queen regalia.

If she does have an actual, physical body, then I suspect this is it, and that it's been like this for at least this entire episode.

The Tachibana assassins enter the house and invite themselves into her room, where they thank her for her assistance in rooting out the enemy. She isn't pleased with what they did, though. I'm not sure what she was hoping would happen when she exposed the Knights, but I guess a bloody purge wasn't it. It could also be that they're talking to a different aspect of her than the one that actually did the deed, of course, and that she'd be more okay with what they did. When she asks why they did it, they simply explain that they can't allow the Wired to conquer humanity; it must remain subordinate to the real world, not dominant over it.

In less contentious news, they say that their employers are in the process of rebuilding the Schumann Wired regulation software from the ground up, and that they're confident they can purge Masami soon. So, that's something at least.

They also tell her that there must be some god or another looking out for her, for her to have survived this long. They also warn her that they have no love for gods of any stripe, in realspace or in the Wired. Okay then. They turn to leave, but one of them stops, turns back around, and removes his eyepiece before telling Lain that they still have no idea what she is.

Given these people's willingness to commit murder and presumably other crimes, and the fact that their employer knows that Lain's family aren't actually her family, you'd think they could have just captured one of her "parents" and interrogated them? Why would they not have done that in all this time?

He also says that he loves her, which isn't creepy at all given not only the age difference but also the...well...everything. He did just kind of come into her house uninvited and low key threaten her life. His colleague laughs at him as they leave.

Lain closes her eyes again, and is then "standing" "outside" on the "street" confronting Dr. Masami again. She asks him what he's going to do now with his worshippers dead or in hiding and his servers about to be wiped. He says that he still has one option that he's confident in.

All he needs to continue being a god, he insists, is Lain.

Okay, I guess we're going to find out why he's so interested in her now!

And, well...I guess this shouldn't have been surprising, but he claims to be her creator. He says that she was born in the Wired, either as an emergent consciousness or a deliberately created AI. Her physical body is a clone that he grew and had some paid actors act as a "family" to in order to properly socialize her.

Lain tells him that that's bullshit. And I'd normally be inclined to agree, given how circuitous and overly risky and complicated this would be (for starters, why raise her out in the real world and not in a Knights facility?), not to mention all the hitherto unmentioned technologies that it would require. But at this point, I'm not sure if there's such a thing as too illogical or too silly for this show, so he might be telling the truth.

When he doesn't relent in the story he's feeding her (or explain how he's planning to use her to preserve himself, exactly), she flips out and explodes multiple telephone wire junctions around them.

Masami vanishes, but it's with a chuckle, so I'm thinking this wasn't a defeat for him. The environment, and Lain herself, are covered in wild sparks of electricity. Of course, I'm not sure if what we're seeing is in the physical world or just a virtual representation of some abstract Wired data environment, in which case the damaged wires could mean anything or nothing. End episode.


This Lain vs. Masami arc is fun in a whacky retro-cyberpunk way. It's just also a very far cry from what Serial Experiments Lain seemed to want to be in the first half or so of the series. The disparate plot threads that seem to almost arbitrarily interact or not interact with each other (the men in black can kill Knights all over the world, but can't interrogate Lain's parents? WHO SENT THAT FUCKING BOMB? Etc) contributes to the dreamlike and delusional feel, but now it's...hmm. I guess early on, SEL felt like it was portraying the experience of mental illness, and now it's just a story that a mentally ill person might tell you. It's still fun to watch, for the most part, but it's not doing anything to regain any serious investment from me.

Three episodes left. I'll be able to judge the show holistically once I reach the end, which should be over the course of this week.